On Greenwich Avenue recently I saw two attractive and well-dressed men walking rapidly in opposite directions. As they approached each other, their eyes dilated slightly, their postures stiffened, and as they passed they exchanged quick glances. After a few moments the man closest to me hesitated then turned around, but seeing only the other’s retreating back, lowered his head and continued on his way. But at that instant the second man also turned and encountering the same apparent indifference, accepted it with an almost identical look of resignation. A classic ritual of cruising, I thought, cut short in their case by bad timing.
A few words from me might have saved the situation and sent the first man in eager pursuit, but I said nothing, convinced that if their interests were strong enough, they would eventually find satisfaction under more favorable circumstances. I had to acknowledge, however, that their next meeting might be no more free of misunderstanding than their first. It wasn’t certain, after all, that their desire for each other would be able to overcome the memory of mutual indifference, and this memory working insidiously might be sufficient to add an extra degree of reserve to their gestures that by incremental steps could force them to a standoff. They would remain in their places at some bar, separated by smoke and shifting bodies, each protecting his self-esteem, each accusing the other in his thoughts of “attitude,” and that sad word like an unwanted consolation would destroy the last hope for openness.
But having gone this far I couldn’t resist entertaining a very different hypothesis—that these two men were not strangers at all, that they had not only met at an earlier time but had had a love affair that had ended through still another set of misunderstandings. For a while they had tried to revive their relationship, had made dates that were never kept, sent messages that were never answered, until with some bitterness they had stopped seeing each other completely. Now chance had brought them together and given them a final opportunity to exchange furtive glances in which they had seen traces of curiosity and possibly of lingering desire for bodies once known so well but now hidden forever beneath neatly tailored business suits. So they had gone off, each carrying away the image of the other’s ultimate rejection, and each comforting himself with the thought that he was well rid of that old agony.
They never noticed me, of course, or imagined how in my mind nothing so much resembled the beginning of their love affair as its end.
